Tag: transgender

“I believe in reincarnation,” my 4-year-old announced, confidently. “And when I come back, I’m going to be a boy, and my name will be Shane.”

“Dreams, like Scheherazade’s stories, keep us alive, keep our ships from crashing too soon, keep our candles in those ocean vessel’s rooms aglow.”

On the cusp of a life-changing procedure, Jane Rideau Demuth makes peace with the paths that brought her here, and the obstacles she had to wrestle with along the way.

“But who gets to impose those rules and who becomes subject to them can be decisions tainted with sexism and racism and transphobia and homophobia. “

Allie Zenwirth falls in love within the confines of an all-male Chasidic school.

Her father’s gender transition was the impetus behind Jill Soloway’s show.

Minda Honey interrogates her sexuality and questions the future of straight-by-default.

“When I started asking myself questions about my own notions of masculinity. I just felt so limited, so suddenly afraid of becoming the kind of man I’d grown up in fear of.”

Journalist Donna Minkowitz realizes 25 years later she was victim to her own internalized homophobia and ignorance on trans issues when she broke the story of Brandon Teena, subject of Boys Don’t Cry.

In this intimate and moving essay, Gabrielle Bellot decides she needs to stop allowing others to define her.

Homeless trans teens: America’s most vulnerable population.

For three years, Casey Parks chronicled the life of Jay, a transgender teenager in Washington State. This is the first installment in a three-part series for the Oregonian.

Thousands of people in the U.S.’s all-volunteer military are transgender.

If you have H.I.V in New York or San Francisco, you can life a long, healthy life. Not so if you live in the Southern United States and you’re poor, black, gay and/or bisexual.

For Alex DiFrancesco, coming out as transgender—even to themself—wasn’t possible without first disappearing.

Christian McMahon so rightly reminds us that everyone has “a right to exist safely in public spaces.”

Belle Boggs writes in Guernica, exploring what the possibility of uterine transplants — no matter how remote or unaccessible the science is — means for trans women.

If the “real” self is inside us, why do we constantly seek to transform our outer surfaces?

In Glamour, Meghan Tear Plummer reflects on her sister’s transition to her brother late in life, and wrestles with what his liberation means for their relationship.

Jason Phoebe Rusch, in a raw and honest essay in Entropy, takes readers through an experience of being transgender that’s different from most of the narratives the media focuses on.

When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.

Every story is, of course, different, though the American media prizes a certain, clean-cut narrative of triumph over adversity. Trans is an umbrella term; it encompasses a variety of gender identities, a million stories.

Earlier this week, for National Coming Out Day, comic actor Julie Novak performed her “one-person show,” “America’s Next Top: One Top’s Take on Life, Love, Tools and Boxes,” off-Broadway at the United Solo Festival. The show offers a funny, eye-opening take on something that has been a source of pain and discomfort, mostly in her early […]

Navigating life with a transgender child.

Princess Anastasia was homeless, and lived and died in the Castro. Two different families piece together a life.

Inspired by the recent National Trans Day of Visibility, here’s a bracingly candid essay by Jane Demuth published at BuzzFeed: “How Running Helped Me Explain My Transition To Myself.” The piece is a sober meditation on running, literally and figuratively. At a time when she’s first transitioning from male to female, Demuth clocks many miles daily, up […]

At The Walrus, Casey Plett calls for more depth in transgender characters in contemporary literature, arguing that cisgender authors writing sympathetic, yet trope-laden transgender narratives might be doing more harm than good. To get it out of the way: the Gender Novels fail to communicate what it’s actually like to transition. Their portrayals of gender-identity […]

My great great grandmother was also a Katharine Marie. I don’t know a lot about her, but I wish I did. I learned that when my parents were choosing names for their baby, they had settled on Katharine were I to be designated female at birth. I only found out when I brought up the […]

Some days I feel I am haunting my past life; other days I feel my past life haunting me. A name, no longer spoken. Voicemails of my old voice, saved. And what is this “I” or “me” that does not include my past life, anyway? When did we separate? Where was the fork? Was it […]

An examination of one family’s experience with a child who has gender dysphoria: As a teacher, Stephen knew how cruel kids could be. He imagined his child walking into the social battlefield that is school, insisting she was a boy when under her clothing, she wasn’t. What about bathrooms? P.E.? The prom? How would all […]